According to a post of Oracle’s A-Team, you can accelerate the startup of WebLogic when configuring “localhost” as ListenAddress. My comment on their posting isn’t enabled yet, so I will share some details here: Actually, that’s a good point, but only half of the picture (especially when looking at all the non-integrated WLS). Here is my response.

Don’t forget to mention that configuring “localhost” causes WebLogic stop doing what you bought it for: accepting requests from any client. Makes sense, doesn’t it?, but some developers don’t get this at first (no offence, it’s typically not their business). Using “localhost” for the JDBC URL is another common mistake in the first version of quite a few configurations I have seen.

As a rule of thumb:

Using “localhost” is almost always wrong in a distributed system configuration.

You are correct, it’s important to put a fixed entry for the listen address (for all manged servers and the admin server as well, and better don’t forget the node manager ). Unlike your private Mac or PC, multi-project, multi-domain machines may have dozens of IP addresses. WLS shouldn’t listen to all available addresses on the machine. So use the IP of your machine. If you are using DHCP you can also put your (qualified) hostname if it can be resolved. This will even work for JDeveloper “integrated” development WLS .